On 18 Sep 2015, at 21:37, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno:
could you please define "free market" (system?) into YOUR terms?
Free, but not free indeed, as you wrote:
"only with a regulating system making it not breaking some laws,... "
Basically that was the state in the US before prohibition.
Free market means free contract between adults, and laws must ensure
the respect of the contracts, not the content of the contract.
where could you STOP the list of those 'laws'?
Laws must evolve, jurisprudence, etc. I am OK with punishing people
doing false advertisement in the matter of health.
I would like we avoid making something illegal because it cures some
important disease, and of course is a threat for those doing money on
that disease, like today with cannabis and cancer to take a notorious
example. I think that the illegality of cannabis is a crime against
humanity, given that the danger have been debunked, and the benefits
have been proved (in the sense of having been able to be repeated in
all laboratories which are not dependent of a big lucrative
organization.
Is a 'regulating system a power?
Like the immune system in biological organism. It is a sort of power,
OK.
(I had a similar problem with identifying "free speech"- not only by
the Supremes'
"MONEY"definition). If market is free, it has a goal: P RO F I T
Imaking. It would
undergo the rules of offer and demand, leading to inequality.
That is why a regulating system is very important: it verifies if the
law of offer and demand is respected. It prevents as much as possible
genuine competition.
The word "free"is ambigious and hard to control. Free travel? we see
it in EU.
And so on.
I agree with you. "free" designates often plausible "protagorean
virtue", which in machine theology can be shown to be destroyed when
asserted on people. That is the case with free-thinking, which leads
to more hidden dogma, or free-exam, etc.
But I am not sure for free-market, which just means that the state
does not intervene in the content of what is sold, with few exceptions
(perhaps) like radioactive material, or anything which is known to be
problematic (meaning the proof of the problem exist and are not
political propaganda). If you study the case of cannabis, all
statements on its danger comes from paper which have not been made
available to the public, and was contradicted by all papers available
to the public. The cannabis set-up was gross, immense, obvious, and
nobody was failed, except the general public and the physicians. Many
doctor, askd to vote for the inegality of marijuana, said that they
were not aware that marijuana was cannabis, at that time, and took
some time to realize the maneuver. We had to wait 10 years before the
paper by Nahas gave the protocols used to prove that cannabis demolish
brain cells, and indeed, now we have them, and it is just ridiculous
(the rabbit were smoking ten joints simultaneously for seven days
24/24, and the neurons have been shown since dying from asphyxia, just
to give one example among many).
Bruno
John Mikes
On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 12:41 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 10 Sep 2015, at 23:17, John Mikes wrote:
Excellent historical analysis, Smitra. Thanks. I was a contemporary
witness
during my adult years (40s to 70s) and vouch for your ideas.
Bruno, however, picked prohibitionism as the main (sole?) culprit
what does not match my conclusions. It was part of it, for sure.
I think I agree with all what Saibal said, but I believe that
nothing can progress in any direction as long as prohibitionism
exist. It might be that stopping prohibition is not enough, but it
is a necessary step. It is not that difficult, as the lies exists
only since 75 years. It is another matter about theology (1500 years
of lies), and matter (billions years of lies).
I found as main culprit the dissatisfaction of the overwhelming
majority of people with their lives as slaves in a capitalistic
system to work for less than what they may have produced.
Well, the term "capitalism" is ambiguous. I am all for the free
market, but only with a regulating system making it not breaking
some laws, like defamation of products and misinformation of the
public. We must avoid mafia-like merchandising of fears, diseases
and wars. Only a few minority makes big benefits, but it go with a
lot of suffering.
Also the 'ownership' claim of Nature, including her products,
beyond the effort the claimant has put into getting them, plus an
ownership of the so called law-enforcement forces to suppress any
opposition - making the advanced society an economical inequality
of haves and have-nots, the latter being forced to work FOR the
former for their mere survival.
Free-market is a win-win strategy. The "capitalism" of today is
everything but free-market. The rich get enrieced by stealing the
money of the less rich. It is not free-market, it is organized
banditism.
Governments are exponents of the rich and powerful and force the
have-nots into their armies to die in wars for the interest of the
wealthy. It is called patriotism. The exploited slaves (dead,
injured casualties of wars) of the system are called heros.
Just to vent off
I agree with you, but I think that it is not the system which is
faulty, but a well prepared perversion of the system, that the
founders of America were quite aware of the possibility.
They did not find a way to solve the problem, except by the US
Constitution, which has been indeed eroded more and more (and is
virtually dead with the NDAA 2012, actually).
It is not a question of politics: it is a question of good and bad
people. The liars, the lied which parrots, and the lied which lives
the lies.
The applied human science, except for laws and democracy (in
principle) is still governed by the "the boss is right" principle.
People are still discouraged to make the thinking and take the
responsibility. Only in movies.
Bruno
John Mikes
On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 1:36 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 31 Aug 2015, at 16:52, smitra wrote:
The real problem i.m.o. is that big powers tend to have a big
inertia, it takes them a long time to see that the World has
changed and that they need to focus on other issues than they
currently are engaged with. In some cases that can lead to
escalation of a pointless conflict that has its roots in past
issues that are no longer relevant, as is the case with the war on
drugs. And that then can cause a lot of harm.
But I think the general issue is this huge inertia. So, when
Gorbachov was in power and he was ready to deal seriously with the
West, it took us a very long time to engage with him. A point on
which we never engaged with the Soviets in a constructive way was
Afghanistan.
The Soviets were willing to withdraw from Afghanistan, even before
Gorbachov came to power, but on certain conditions like leaving
behind a stable government. We never wanted to engage with the
Soviets on that, because of pur mondset that the root of all evil
was communism, and the Soviets were just talking bullshit about our
allies there, the Jihadists.
Them posing a threat to the World? that to us was just ridiculous.
We knew for sure that with the Soviets gone out of Afghanistan,
their communist puppet government dismantled, the Afghan population
would be able to form a democratic state. We were so sure about
this that we never critically analyzed all the hidden assumptions
made here.
It later turned out that we were wrong and that the Soviets were
right, not in their general approach but about seeing the threat of
Jihadism that we helped to fuel. Also they were right about the
dangers of having failed states. Our ideology at the time was that
a failed state would quickly get itself organized into a
flourishing democracy if you could only keep the evil communists out.
Another fallout of this was that Gorbachov's political position was
weakened in the Soviet Union, which made his nationalist
opposition who were critical of the West politically stronger. When
Yeltsin took over he had to deal with an economically weak Russia
while in the background there were forces lurking who were
extremely critical of the West. In any country you'll have the
opposition that tends to question the government's policy
especially if things are not going well economically and especially
when there has been a recent radical change. In the years after the
collapse of communism that move was democratization, liberalization
of the economy etc. etc.
It's easy for us to say that the Russians who were critical at the
time were stupid, just look at the opposition in the US against a
universal health care system. Now, if we could turn back the clock
and had dealt with Afghanistan differently, then the outcome of
that might not just have prevented the rise of international
Jihadism, you would also have had the pro-Western reformists in
Russia to be in a politically far stronger position. Likely you
would not have had Putin in power today, or Putin may not have
become that anti-Western (he wasn't when came into power).
Another thing is that we would have improved the UN Security
Council System to deal with complex problems. As it currently
functions, the UNSC is a panel of prosecutors who are the World's
policemen, prosecutor, jury and judge at the same time without a
requirement for members to recuse themselves when they are involved.
The system works fine in emergency situations, like when Iraq
invaded Kuwait, just like a police can intervene effectively when
there is a bank robbery going on. But when the emergency situation
is dealt with, we all know that you need a proper justice system to
deal with the problem on the longer term. We know that what cannot
work is a system where the local police can have a caucus with
other police officers from neighboring areas to deal with that.
Even if you assume that police officers can be 100% objective, you
would still not have much faith in a system where the police
officers could be the prosecutors juries, judges, appeals judges
and Supreme Court judges all at the same time.
This i.m.o. is the reason why Iraq was invaded. Iraq under Saddam
Hussein (supported by both superpowers in the 1980s) could never
prove that it had no WMD within the current system once some
prosecutors decided to throw the book at him.
Had instead the Western powers thought critically about how to
improve the international institutions instead of seeing the
collapse of the Soviet Union as a big gain in their power within
the current system, the UNSC could have been reformed. You can
think of a system where the UNSC continues to exist in its present
form but that it creates a new institution where judges rule on
contentious fundings of facts. The UNSC could then have referred
difficult dossiers like the Iraq WMD case, Iran's nuclear program
etc. to such an institution where decisions are made on the basis
of real evidence instead of political rhetoric.
I think I agree with your analysis, but I think there is much more,
which is the disparition/erosion of the separation of power, which
is part of the making of the rhetoric.
So, I put most of the blame of the current situation on the West's
failures to just think about the long term during the late stages
of the Cold War.
As long as prohibitionist are not all in jail, or amnestied
perhaps, some corporatism will will continue to make huge profits
in diseases and war selling.
The war on terror is fake, because if that was genuine, the most
urgent thing which would have been done is to stop prohibition,
which is the fuel, even the main engine of international crimes and
terrorism, and it is know today that whatever drug is prohibited,
the consumption of it is multiplied by a large factor (which is
normal as you offer the market to the criminals).
I mean that it is not just our incompetence, there is a part of
unwillingness. We tolerate the lies on important things, like on
cancers, indeed we tolerate that people think for us about what is
good or bad to us, but that's contradict already the intent of most
of the founders of America.
As long as prohibitionism is not abolished, I think we must remain
skeptical about any *official* theory by default. Liars lie rarely
only once. Prohibition rotten everything. International prohibition
can only lead to international chaos, mafia wars, well disguised.
Bruno
Saibal
On 30-08-2015 22:34, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/30/2015 10:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
- the governments know that prohibition is the main fuel of
criminality and terrorism.
So Muslims flew planes into buildings government (which one?)
prohibited something (what?).
Brent
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